The Poison Sky

by John Shannon

  A penny was starting to drop. “How long ago did he first start pulling up chemistry files?”

  “Just about three weeks.”

  “And the first Bhopal files?”

  “That was all the day before yesterday.”

  The first time he could have logged on after his accident, assuming he had a way to do it at the hospital. The penny hit and went right on through to the bottom. The bounty hunters weren’t worried about anything to do with Jimmy Mardesich and the Theodelphian Elect. They were worried about Milo Mardesich, the dangerous whistle-blower, and his pal and accomplice Jack Liffey. The dog righted himself all at once and trotted away.

  He stared at the disappearing rump of the dog as Loco shouldered his way through the partially open door into the bedroom like a lazy drunk.

  “Michael, I’ve got another favor to ask.” He had used a cranky old tape machine to record the beeps and boops off his kitchen redial. “If I play you the sound of my telephone dialing a number, can you find out what the number is and who has it?”

  “Ask me something tough, dude. Hold on.” There was a minute’s delay, with a lot of rustling and banging at the other end. “Okay, shoot it over here, big shot.”

  Jack Liffey played the sound of the number.

  “Got it. I can give you the number right now, but if you want the name and address, call me in half an hour.”

  “Thanks, Michael. I owe you one on this.”

  “Feetch-feetch.”

  It was high time he had a talk with Milo Mardesich, just as soon as he returned the big Lincoln and got his car back.

  “I kinda figured you wasn’t rolling in dough,” the owner said. The shop was a big Quonset hut outside Fillmore called Esteban’s and this was probably Esteban himself, fortyish and brown and round as a berry, with the sleeves of his greasy shirt rolled right up to his armpits. Ranchera music was beating away from the dim depths of the shop, and Jack Liffey liked the fact that this was one guy who probably wouldn’t ask him anything about the weird haircut. “When you said, just get it going, you know, however.”

  “You figured right.”

  “The steering was easy to fix, but the rest is pretty … transitorio.”

  “Temporary,” Jack Liffey suggested.

  He nodded and led him around a huge tangled pile of broken car parts to the wounded Concord in back. On the bad side they’d tied rope around the window pillars to hold the beat-up doors shut and the windows had been sealed over with thick plastic wrap and duct tape.

  “I like fixing for cheap.”

  Jack Liffey couldn’t resist patting the roof of the car. At least the thing got an extended life span with him, and it would fit right in with all the other beaters driven around L.A. by janitors and their families newly arrived from Oaxaca who had hired on somewhere at decent wages only to see their jobs contracted out to some fly-by-night firm that dropped them to minimums. The car of the broken dream. L.A. was full of them.

  “What do I owe you?”

  He shrugged apologetically. “Can you do twenty bucks?”

  Jack Liffey figured a double take wouldn’t be a good idea. “I can do twenty bucks. I’ll come up here and give you some real work when I can afford it.”

  “You don’t owe me nothing, but I might be able to find you some new doors cheap.”

  “Give me your card and I’ll call you.”

  “Card?”

  “I’ll look you up in the book.”

  “CHEN, Michael, at your service.”

  He had called from a pay phone in a Mobil station. “This is Jack. What can you tell me about that number?”

  “Technically it’s unlisted. It’s corporate, unassigned. The bill payer is GreenWorld Chemical.”

  “Bingo. Thanks, wizard. I’ll buy you a new floppy disk.”

  “Twenty-three skidoo. You really are out of date.”

  ON the way back to the Valley, he slowed past the spot of the accident, out of a kind of dark nostalgia. There was a bit of rutting off the shoulder where the tow truck had spun its wheels to drag the car out of the ditch, but nothing else. He wondered how many people would ever see that sign and try to interpret it—acting out a sort of archaeology of bad luck. Farther along he saw other ruts, and scrapes in the guardrail, and black skid marks on the pavement, each a sign of somebody’s heartache. The world was funny that way, he thought, chockablock with the scars of events just about everywhere but damned reticent about what they meant.

  His new passenger-side windows billowed and flapped whenever he went over forty but they seemed to be holding. Just before the interstate his eye caught on something odd by the side of the road. Somebody had collected a lot of roadkill, dead possums and rabbits and a few cats and a small dog, and arranged them into a regular dot-dash along the shoulder. He wondered if it had been an impulse to order, trying to make the markings fit into a pattern so the world wouldn’t seem so haphazard. Like religion.

  From the freeway, St. Agnes Hospital looked even more like an office building for accountants. He parked under a sign that reserved a row of parking places for VISTOR’ES and wondered idly how many grammatical errors you could possibly wedge into a single word. He followed a gaggle of nurses in under a long carriage porch that thrust into the parking lot. One of the young nurses wore a beige duster that just whisked the ground, like something from a J. Peterman catalog. He liked the dashing look of it.

  A hand-lettered card in a name bracket by the door of the room said Mardesich and the second bracket was empty, so he guessed it was temporarily a private room. When he put his eye to the peekaboo window, he was surprised to see Jimmy Mardesich leaning over the bed talking to his father. The boy was wearing a ratty letterman’s jacket and he opened and closed his flat palms like a book, as if offering his father something insubstantial but precious. The elder Mardesich was off the respirator but still on an IV drip. One hand clung lightly to the boy’s jacket sleeve, as if it was a talisman. Jack Liffey was surprised to see the contact between them and he decided to leave them to it for a while.

  Unlike every other hospital corridor on earth, there was actually somewhere to sit, a plastic chair left against the wall, and he sat and folded his hands and went into a kind of suspended animation that let him mull over the events of the last week. He was still working on readjusting his footing to take account of the fact that the Theodelphians were irrelevant, and always had been. If any cruise missiles had his name chalked on the nose cone, they were coming from another place entirely.

  A young black man in a filthy white coat came down the hallway, juggling a small beanbag casually off his elbows and forearms and occasionally his forehead.

  “Climbers do rope,” he said distinctly as he passed Jack Liffey and popped the bag up off the back of his wrist. “Masons do bricks … junkies do dope … and doctors do dicks …”

  He wondered if it was a counting game he’d never heard of, something that had been around in the black community for centuries. Down the corridor the man dropped the beanbag and swept it up again nonchalantly. “Damn. Dead twice on dicks.”

  He decided he’d have to visit Mike Lewis, the only man he knew with a finger firmly on the pulse of the city, and ask the inside dope on dirty chemical companies. But first he had to find out if Milo Mardesich had indeed logged himself on from the hospital and what he’d been up to.

  The door to the room swung open and closed heavily with a wubb-wuff and the boy stood blinking in the brighter corridor. He looked at Jack Liffey, and recognition slowly filled him like a liquid rising into his eyes, but he didn’t betray anything more than the recognition.

  “Mr. Liffey. It’s good to see you again.”

  “Have you left the headers?”

  The slang name didn’t throw him.

  “Yes, I have. There wasn’t much more for me there. I think I’m on a path in another direction.”

  “I thought you were going to let me know.”

  “There’s a message on your machine. I neede
d to tell my father, too.” The boy had the same curious atonality to his speech that he’d had in Ojai, as if a drug were taking the edge off everything.

  “How did he take it?” The boy was so tall in front of him that he was growing uncomfortable talking up at him from the chair, so he stood up, but the boy was still a couple inches taller.

  “He took it all very well. It’s the first time in months he actually heard what I said to him. We had a good talk. I told him where I need to go right now.”

  “Maybe there’s a side to his character you never appreciated.”

  “Maybe. I have a great deal to learn.” There wasn’t a trace of irony in the boy.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I think it’s important for me to live amongst the poor for a while. I don’t think it’s possible to appreciate the things they may know about the world if you don’t share their life.”

  “Just how poor are we planning to be?”

  “I thought I’d start downtown near the missions.”

  Jack Liffey raised his eyebrows. “If we’re truly planning to share the life on skid row, we’re going to have to acquire a couple of blood diseases, some running sores on our legs, a taste for Thunderbird, a gash in the head, and a lot of green phlegm.”

  Even that didn’t get a rise out of the boy. “I hope that’s not going to be necessary.”

  “It’s probably going to be unavoidable.” He checked his watch. They didn’t usually enforce visiting hours, but he had to talk to the elder Mardesich and he couldn’t take a chance. “I need to talk to your dad for a few minutes. Will you wait for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Wait here. Sit right there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Will you wait?”

  “Why would I lie?” He seemed nonplussed.

  Jack Liffey chuckled. “People have been known to.”

  The boy smiled, but it was a different and gentler music he smiled to, not cynicism about human nature. He sat like a big automaton winding down and Jack Liffey went into Milo’s room.

  THE room had that hospital smell of antiseptic and plastic, plus some indefinably human aroma of innocent pain and innocent fear. He noticed that the other bed wasn’t vacant after all, but held a wizened figure that lay rigidly in a fetal position with extra pillows propping up his scrawny legs and arms. Milo Mardesich sat up in bed watching a silent TV. He pulled out an earplug when he saw Jack Liffey.

  “You may not remember me, Mr. Mardesich. Jack Liffey. Your wife hired me to find your son. I had more hair when you saw me last.”

  “And you did your job, implacably I bet, like a bloodhound.” There was the same mystifying hostility, maybe no more than a reflex against an outside world that disturbed his calm.

  “But I’m a postmodern detective, so I probably did it with less authenticity than Philip Marlowe would have.”

  That got his attention, though he still pretended to be interested in the monitor that sat on a bracket on the wall. Jack Liffey stared at the television, too, where they both watched a man with a television camera stalking into the lobby of a public building.

  “I believe,” Milo Mardesich said, “that the simple presence of a television camera in a public space creates a high probability of a violent event.” He switched off the monitor and turned to look at Jack Liffey.

  “Your actions sure increased the probability in my life,” Jack Liffey said calmly. “Your wife’s, too. How did you log on from here?”

  “Hospitals are full of computers.”

  “Somebody was watching your account, and I think they got really upset when you started reading about Bhopal.”

  His eyes became suspicious.

  “Friends of mine were watching, too. Your enemies are now my enemies, so we ought to have a little talk. I think it’s probably too late to back down.”

  “What happened to Faye?”

  The man in the other bed gurgled a little, and they both turned to listen for a moment. Something trundled past in the corridor.

  “She’s fine. We had a little car accident when my steering was sabotaged. There have been other incidents, so I’d like to know what you know or what you’ve seen or what somebody thinks you’ve seen.”

  “Maybe somebody’s just taking you off.”

  “Uh-uh. Guys show up and use your name a lot and then they talk like goons in a thirties movie. It’s embarrassing.”

  Mardesich raised his eyebrows. “I don’t really know you.”

  Jack Liffey nodded to the phone on the bedside table. “Call your wife. She knows me. I’ll give you some space.”

  He left the room and the boy stood up, but Jack Liffey motioned him to sit back down. “I’m not through here yet. I’ll give you a ride anywhere you want if you agree to stay in touch.”

  “Sure.”

  They heard a door open and turned to watch a small group coming out of a room down the hall. A little girl tugged angrily against the arm of a gaunt woman who seemed to have been crying, and a heavy woman walked haughtily behind them both. Her hands were occupied with a black cowboy hat and a toy tomahawk with a feather on the shaft.

  “You promised me a pony ride!” the girl complained.

  “Shut your bloody cakehole, girl!” the gaunt woman barked.

  He saw Jimmy Mardesich recoil slightly from the emotion. The little girl retreated inside herself and let herself be led along, and the boy watched sadly as the grim procession went past them.

  “What makes it so hard for a woman like that to be kind?”

  “Her own pain?”

  “We all have pain.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to be able to take it all on yourself,” Jack Liffey said.

  The boy glanced at him with a worried look. “I just need to understand it. That’s why I left the Theodelphians. They couldn’t explain things.”

  “You know … I hate to say this, but it’s possible the Big Engineer up in the sky never got it right, and things can’t be explained. Some people get lollipops and some get shit, and there it is.”

  The boy took it in, but didn’t react. Jack Liffey walked across to glance through the peekaboo window just as Milo Mardesich hung up the phone. “Stick around.”

  As he entered, he noticed the old man on the other bed was breathing noisily, but it didn’t seem to be distress.

  “Faye says I can trust you, you’re a regular Sam Spade.” Milo seemed to have gone a bit dreamy, as if a drug had kicked in.

  He’d rather have been Philip Marlowe because Spade had a nasty streak, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry I caused this mess, it’s typical of me the last few years. I think I’m the original Hard Luck Kid. Even when I try to do something selfless, it backfires. At some point life just becomes a whole bunch of things you don’t want to do but you’ve got to do.”

  “Could we explain this in some sort of order?”

  He smiled slightly. “Sorry. You know I was working as a night watchman at GreenWorld Chemical. There were always two of us on duty, and every hour one of us would have to do the rounds. You know, you carry that big punch clock on your waist and there’s keys on chains in these little boxes all over the grounds. You walk around and insert one key after another in your clock and it records you were there at that hour doing your duty.

  “Most of the place … Well, I don’t know what they do in most of the place, but out in the middle there’s an area behind a lot of skull-and-crossbones signs that’s got holding tanks for toxic waste, a kind of transshipment yard where I think they collect waste from little manufacturing companies all over and then when the tanks are full, they do whatever they do. Every night I’d see these scabby old tank trucks pulling in and pumping waste into the tanks. Some of them had Mexican plates and some were California and they all said ‘Joe’s Waste Collection’ or ‘Ed and Arnie’s Refuse’ or things like that. Some were GreenWorld trucks and they looked a little better.

  “I only had one key station in
that area and the smell was pretty bad, like somebody spent about half the day burning cats around there, so I got in and out pretty quick. I noticed, once a week, Thursday about one A.M., a big shiny–stainless steel truck came in and loaded itself up. One Thursday I’m clocking myself into the toxic yard and the driver of the shiny truck tried to bum a cigarette from me. He was a big guy with a kidney belt like a lot of truckers and a strong New York accent and a real fuck-you attitude, even when he was asking a favor. Just to be friendly, I asked him where he takes the stuff he picks up, and right away he turns into George Raft, tells me to mind my own beeswax. That got me to thinking and then it got me to watching for him. And one Thursday I called in sick and I waited outside the gates and I followed him. I must have been flat out of my mind.”

  The breath rasped across the room and the bed creaked, and slowly Jack Liffey became aware that the old man over there was perfectly conscious and masturbating. The cords in the back of the man’s neck tensed, and finally Jack Liffey came around to the chair on the far side of Milo Mardesich’s bed and sat so his back was to the busy creak-creaking.

  “I followed that truck all the way out to the desert. I figured there was an incinerator or a government dump of some kind out there, but he turned off on a small ramp called Corn Springs Road and then onto an old stretch of Highway 60 that’s parallel to 1-10. I had to turn out my lights and follow him slowly but he got slow, too. There was nothing on that road but a few abandoned foundations of old gas stations. Then the smell came in my window and I realized what he was doing. He’d opened up the taps and he was dumping his evil concoction on the old road as he drove along.”

  The air conditioner kicked in and the sound mercifully helped cover the insistent whittling noise from the old man just as it seemed to be coming to a crescendo.

  “I stopped when I saw what I was driving on because I didn’t want to expose myself to any more of that stuff than I had to, but I’m sure he emptied his whole load on that back road. It’s called Chuckawalla Road now, out past Chiriaco Summit, if you want to check it out.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”